Service Opns Return To Roots

International Journal of Operations & Production Management
Service operations management: return to roots

Robert Johnston
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Robert Johnston, (2005),"Service operations management: return to roots", International Journal of
Operations & Production Management, Vol. 25 Iss 12 pp. 1278 - 1297
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IJOPM ORIGINAL PAPER

25,12
Service operations management:
return to roots
1278
Robert Johnston
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Abstract
Purpose – Over many years there has been an emergence of a large-scale, worldwide academic
movement concerned with the management of services. This paper, originally published in 1999, aims
to chart the role and impact of operations management (OM) on this movement and to propose that the
key focus for service academics should be with the application of frameworks and techniques.
Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual discussion and approach are taken.
Findings – Suggests that as the service movement has grown, with increasing overlap between the
subjects of operations, marketing and HRM for example, there is a need to “return to roots”. Contends
that service academics, in their bid to develop cross-functional service management material, may
have lost, or inadvertently ignored, the strength of their core disciplines. Refocusing on the traditional
strengths of OM, such as performance quality, design, and operational improvement, might help
provide a greater rigour to the developing subject of service management.
Originality/value – Discusses nine areas for service operations research and suggests specific
research questions.
Keywords Management theory, Service operations, Operations management
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
“Service” captured the interest and imagination of operations management (OM)
academics in the 1980s. The service movement was driven, in part, by a realisation that
classes were filled with students who would be, or were, involved in
non-manufacturing tasks. There was some disillusion felt with the existing OM
material, by both the students and academics. Economic batch quantities, line
balancing, and stock control are just a few of the topics widely taught then which bore
little relation to the key issues faced by managers running service operations. That is
not to say that these tools and techniques were of no value, but customer service,
service quality and service design were central issues facing many service operations
managers, yet there were no tools or techniques to help them in these matters.
The need for service-based material was also timely. It matched the emerging
realisation of the importance of the customer and a more customer-oriented view of
operations. This was a significant shift away from the more internally focused
efficiency view of OM. It also fitted with a growing “strategic” trend in operations. This
International Journal of Operations & questioned the traditional reactive role of operations and attempted to make the subject
Production Management
Vol. 25 No. 12, 2005 more market oriented by understanding how operations could not only support but
pp. 1278-1297
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0144-3577
This article was first published in IJOPM Volume 19 Issue 2 (1999), pp. 104-24. It has been
DOI 10.1108/01443570510633657 included here as part of the 25th anniversary issue of the journal.
also help develop a strategic advantage (Hayes and Wheelwright, 1984; Hill, 1985, Service OM:
1989; Skinner, 1974a, b, 1985). return to roots
Service operations have great appeal, and they are all around us. There is a plethora
of examples and experiences and, indeed, research data that can be gleaned from
everyday life: service operations are all pervasive. They are, therefore, a normal part of
our students’ lives. They can easily relate to the problems of scheduling hospital beds,
the layout of a multiplex cinema or the quality of a retail encounter. Although 1279
undoubtedly important, car factories, paper mills and plastic coating lines can seem
remote from many people’s lives. Furthermore, each one of us is almost constantly
playing out some role or other within a service operation. As students sit in a lecture
they are playing a part in a service experience, just as we are delivering, or rather
orchestrating, that service. As they go to the library, or to eat, or to socialise, they are
having interactive service experiences. Service “factories” are everywhere; “The mall is
my factory” is the title of a reflective piece on service operations by Chase (1996).
Operations academics, just like operations practitioners, tend to be enthusiasts.

On plant tours, students experience their teacher’s fascination and insights into the
processes and the systems and procedures that support them. Student feedback lays
testimony to their enthusiasm, understanding and fascination with all things
operational. Service operations are even more compelling. The full title of Chase’s
paper is “The mall is my factory: reflections of a service junkie”. In it he provides some
tell-tale signs of the service operations “junkie” which might sound uncomfortably
familiar to many service operations academics:
.
You ask the resort hotel manager if you could peek at the reservation system
while you are on vacation rather than spending an afternoon on the beach.
.
You go out of your way to visit theme parks in Korea just to benchmark them
against Disneyland.
.
You are more interested in the planes and taxis you took to get to the factory tour
than you are in the factory.
.
You provide unsolicited feedback to your dentist on how the scheduling and
appointments system could be improved.
I would like to add a couple more:

.
Your partner is reluctant to be taken to a restaurant to celebrate your wedding
anniversary in case something goes wrong.
.
Your children will only go with you to the theme park if you promise not to
debrief them on the way home.
This growing and compelling interest in service was happening in many parts of the
world and in different functional areas (Brown et al., 1994; Grönroos, 1994; Johnston,
1994; Schneider, 1994). In marketing, accounting, and HRM, for example, academics
were waking up to their service-based students. There was growing concern about the
product-based nature of their material. Marketing seemed preoccupied with the
marketing of white goods. Accountancy academics used examples which were based
around an imaginary product, the “widget”. Ironically, this has become the accepted
name for a beer can insert which forces gas into the beer when the can is opened, in
order to provide a creamy head (No doubt the majority of OM academics will have
IJOPM opened up a can to have a look!). Thus the service management movement was born in
25,12 many different disciplines by people united by a shared enthusiasm and interest for all
things intangible.
From these early beginnings, a large-scale, worldwide movement gained pace and
membership. Over the last 10-20 years, this has had a profound effect on research and
teaching. The service operations movement, like the service marketing movement, has
1280 been characterised by a number of stages; an initial realisation of the difference
between goods and service, the development of conceptual frameworks and the
empirical testing of these frameworks (Brown et al., 1994). I would contend that
we are now entering a fourth stage concerned with the application of the tools and
frameworks to improve service management. I would also contend that as the service
movement has grown, with increasing overlap between the subjects of operations,
marketing, and HRM for example, this fourth stage is also characterised by a “return to
roots”, a realisation that we might have lost, or inadvertently ignored, the strength of
our core disciplines and the need to bring a sense of academic rigour and depth to the
developing subject of service management.
The next sections briefly chart the development of operations through the first three
stages and lay out the challenges as we enter this fourth stage in the development of
service OM. Several areas for future research are discussed.
Stage one – service awakening

Before 1980, business academics were primarily concerned with the production,
marketing, and management of physical goods. By 1955, the service sector accounted
for just over 50 per cent of the UK’s gross domestic product, overtaking the
product-based sectors. Yet it took another 20 years before the OM academics of the day
started to apply their knowledge and skills to service operations. OM in 1970 was
known as production management (Chase and Aquilano, 1973). It had developed out of
an even more focused view of operations, factory management (Lockyer, 1962). Factory
management was the name given to the search for efficiency in the post-industrial
revolution era based upon Taylor’s (1911) philosophy of scientific management.
Production management was concerned with applying method study techniques,
production planning and control, capacity management, and materials management,
for example in production settings, with examples coming from a wider base than
“pure” manufacturing and including examples such as distribution, transportation,
hospitals, libraries, and publishers (Adam and Ebert, 1982; Evans et al., 1984;
Stevenson, 1982; Wild, 1980).
In 1970s, there was an emerging recognition of service operations and the first two
texts to place some emphasis on the service sector were Johnson et al. (1972) and
Buffa (1976). Both books were entitled Operations Management:
. . .to reflect the growing emphasis on the breadth of application of production management
concepts and techniques. . . (in) non-manufacturing and service industries as well as
manufacturing (Buffa, 1976).
The authors’ good intentions are not borne out by the content of their books. Johnson
et al. used the word “service” just once in Chapter 1 and then reverted to discussion of
the traditional production management techniques in manufacturing settings, with the
exception of some discussion of mathematical programming applied to distribution
systems and the scheduling of service and transportation systems. Buffa, likewise, Service OM:
recognised the existence and indeed importance of service and dedicated two chapters return to roots
to the application of queuing theory, aggregate planning and scheduling in hospitals.
One may argue that they were simply paying lip service. I would argue that they began
the transformation of the subject.
The service movement appears to have gathered greater momentum in the field of
marketing. Johnson’s (1969) dissertation was the first to ask the question “Are goods 1281
and services really different?” (quoted in Brown et al., 1994). Judd (1964) proposed a
typology of service and Rathmell (1966) encouraged marketers to devote more
attention to the service sector. The first two service books were written by Johnson
(1964) (a monograph) and Rathmell (1974). Shostack (1977) wrote “a landmark article”
(Brown et al., 1994) “which was to alter the course of our thinking” (Kotler quoted in
Grönroos, 1990) which challenged marketers to provide concepts, guidance,
terminology and rules from the service sector. Europeans, Keith Blois, John Bateson,
Pierre Eiglier and Eric Langeard, joined the American-led initiative with service
contributions of their own (Bateson, 1977; Blois, 1974; Eiglier et al, 1977).
Service operations was a little slower off the mark, as service OM was “essentially
operations research (OR) applied to service settings” (Chase, 1996). A major
breakthrough came in 1976 with the publication of Earl Sasser’s article “Match supply
and demand in service industries” in the Harvard Business Review, followed two years
later by the pioneering textbook Management of Service Operations (Sasser et al., 1978)
containing what are now regarded as classic cases and issues. Chase (1978) also wrote
a service article for the HBR “Where does the customer fit in a service operation?”. He
challenged the OM community to consider two types of operations; the traditional back
office factory and the customer-facing, customer-contact front office. Chase and Sasser
et al. provided academic credibility and authority to the study of customer-based
operations. Other papers with distinct operations themes included “Production-line
approach to service” (Levitt, 1972), “Quality control in a service business” (Hostage,
1975), “The new back office focuses on customer service” (Matteis, 1979), and
“Marketing’s potential for improving productivity in service industries” (Lovelock and
Young, 1979). Levitt’s paper is still proving a rich source of inspiration for recent
papers (Bowen and Youngdahl, 1998).
In essence, stage one (referred to by Brown et al. (1994) using the analogy of the
development of the human species) was the “crawling out” stage and was characterised
by recognition of the existence of service. The nature of academic work was primarily
descriptive and focused on the difference between goods and services (Brown et al.,
1994). Chase (1996) described this as the “classification era”. Although Levitt et al. and
colleagues had started the service operations revolution, service operations was still
very wedded to its factory roots. Furthermore, whilst there was awareness of some of
the efforts in other functions (Chase, 1996), the concept of a cross-functional subject of
service management was some way off. Research was undertaken in subject areas with
little or no cross-fertilisation. Figure 1 summarises the characteristics of this stage in
the development of service OM.
Stage two – breaking free from product-based roots

The period between 1980 and 1985 was a time of “high interest and enthusiasm” in
services (Brown et al., 1994). It was accepted that services were different from goods
IJOPM
25,12
1282
Figure 1.
Stage one – service
awakening
(though that debate rumbled on (see, for example, Lockyer (1986) and Morris and
Johnston (1987))). During this “scurrying about” period (Brown et al., 1994), many
substantive issues were debated. The work was principally conceptual in nature and
was characterised by the development of frameworks to help understand the
characteristics of service and service management (Bowen and Schneider, 1985;
Grönroos, 1984; Parasuraman et al., 1985). Service operations academics continued
their work on “customer operations” (Chase, 1981; Maister and Lovelock, 1982). This
focus on the customer and the service encounter was growing apace in the other
functions. Publications on this topic included “The critical incident as a technique for
analysing the service encounter” (Bitner et al., 1985), “Boundary spanning role
employees and the service encounter: some guidelines for management research”
(Bowen and Schneider, 1985) and “Perceived control and the service encounter”
(Bateson, 1985).
Operations academics were also breaking ground with new perspectives on
traditional themes. Wyckoff (1984), for example, wrote what might be considered an
early TQM paper “New tools for achieving service quality”. In this period, the first two
service OM texts were written (Fitzsimmons and Sullivan, 1982; Voss et al., 1985). We
also witnessed the first “challenge” papers on service OR; “The service sector:
challenges and imperatives for research in operation management” (Sullivan, 1982) and
“Service operation management: research and application” (Mabbert, 1982).
The main characteristic of stage two was that the study of service appeared to have
broken free from its product-based roots. There was also recognition of, and reference
to, the research undertaken in the other disciplines undertaking service research.
The epitome of this era was the well-regarded paper by Parasuraman et al. (1985) “A
conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research”. This was
a major step in the development of the cross-functional subject of service management.
Service quality was a topic, which was seen as important by all of the different
functional areas, and where they could all make a contribution. This landmark article
(and subsequent studies by the authors) not only stimulated a huge amount of activity
in the marketing area but also threw down the gauntlet to the operations area, as it was
realised that other functional areas had important things to say about a topic which
had traditionally been seen as “operations”. It was also a different approach to quality,
in stark contrast to the statistical process control (SPC) approach. This was also the
case when Shostack’s (1984) article “Designing services that deliver” was seized upon
by marketers as they moved into process mapping, previously a cornerstone of OM.
Interest in internally focused service operations did not cease, however (Blois, 1984; Service OM:
Johnston and Morris, 1985). return to roots
There was also recognition of cross-functional issues in papers such as “The
employee as customer” (Berry, 1981) and in a text by Eiglier and Langeard (1987)
Servuction which combined aspects of marketing and production, though the text is
subtitled “Le marketing des services”. We also witnessed the production of what might
be regarded as the first service management text (Normann, 1984). The service 1283
management area was also gaining some degree of respectability with the publication
of two journals; The Service Industries Journal in 1980 and the Journal of Professional
Services Marketing in 1985.
For operations this was a period when the nature of service and service operations
was classified as a prelude to the development of tools and concepts. The dimensions
included customer contact time (Chase, 1981), degree of customisation (Maister and
Lovelock, 1982; Johnston and Morris, 1985), the amount of judgement exercised by front
office staff (Lovelock, 1983), whether the value was added in the front or back office
(Maister, 1983), the operation’s product or process focus (Johnston and Morris, 1985).
These discussions resulted in the now widely-accepted categorisation of service
operations; mass, professional, and service shop (Schmenner, 1986; Silvestro et al., 1992).
The key characteristics of stage two are summarised in Figure 2.
Stage three – the service management era

The third stage in the development of the service movement, which Brown described as
the “walking erect” stage, has been characterised by the cross-disciplinary nature of
service research; a coming together of disciplines. Marketing, operations and HRM, in
particular, brought together their various strengths and perspectives to issues of common
concern. This period, from around 1985 to 1995, was the era of service management (as
distinct from service marketing or service operations); a subject whose strength lies in its
cross-disciplinary nature and approaches. Three interdisciplinary conferences began, the
Figure 2.
Stage two – breaking
from product-based roots
IJOPM International Research Seminar, hosted by Eric Langeard and Pierre Eiglier from the
25,12 Université Aix-Marseilles; the quality in services (QUIS), alternating between Sweden and
USA; and the Frontiers in Service Conference at Vanderbilt, USA.
The research undertaken in this stage was predominantly concerned with the
empirical testing of ideas and frameworks resulting in underpinned and tested models
(Bitner et al., 1990; Collier, 1991; Fitzgerald et al., 1991; Parasuraman et al., 1988; Rust
1284 and Oliver, 1994). Conceptual frameworks and ideas continued to emerge to form the
basis for fresh empirical work. This period was certainly an important milestone in the
development of the subject. Chase (1996) referred to this stage as the “theory
testing/empirical era” where we “have been moving from developing conceptual
frameworks to refining their dimensions and validating them empirically”.
Industry-focused studies, survey research and case studies seem to have dominated
this stage of development.
Some of the main operations-oriented issues that were being researched are shown
in Table I (this list is not meant to be complete or comprehensive, but simply indicative
of the wide range and depth of issues being researched).
Topic Selected references
Customer relationships Storbacka (1995) and Storbacka et al. (1994)

Failure prevention in services Chase and Stewart (1994), Kelley et al. (1993) and Stauss (1993)
Internal services Gremler et al. (1994), Mattsson (1992) and Vandermerwe and Gilbert
(1991)
JIT in service Duclos et al. (1995)
Managing the customer Bowen (1986), Johnston (1989) and Mills and Morris (1986)
Performance measurement Brignall et al. (1992) and Fitzgerald et al. (1991)
Process control Haynes and DuVall (1992)
Quality measurement Babakus and Boller (1992), Cronin and Taylor (1992, 1994), Finn and
Lamb (1991) and Parasuraman et al. (1988)
Satisfying the customer Anderson and Fornell (1994), Bitner and Hubbert (1994), Danaher and
Mattsson (1994) and Johnston (1995a)
Service capacity Armistead and Clark (1994a) and Lovelock (1992)
Service design Behara and Chase (1993), Fitzsimmons and Maurer (1991), Gouillart
and Sturdivant (1994), Katz et al. (1991) and Shapiro et al. (1992)
Service encounter Bitner et al. (1990), Bowen and Schneider (1985), Czepiel et al. (1985)
and Lewis and Entwistle (1990)
Service environment Bitner (1992) and Wakefield and Blodgett (1994)
Service focus Davidow and Uttal (1989a), Kimes and Johnston (1990) and Van
Dierdonck and Brandt (1988)
Service guarantees Hart (1988, 1990, 1995)
Service operations strategy Armistead (1990)
Service process Collier (1991), Johnston (1995b) and Kingman-Brundage (1989)
Service productivity Armistead et al. (1988)
Service quality Andersson (1991), Rust and Oliver (1994) and Zeithaml et al. (1990)
Service recovery Armistead and Clark (1994b), Bell and Zemke (1987), Edvardsson
(1992), Hart (1990), Johnston (1995c) and Kelley and Davis (1994)
Service technology Collier (1985) and Faulhaber et al. (1986)
Table I. TQM in services Davidow and Uttal (1989b) and Desler and Farrow (1990)
Some OM research issues Yield management Kimes (1989)
1985-1995 Zero defections Reichheld (1996) and Reichheld and Sasser (1990)
There was also a realisation that service management and service operations in Service OM:
particular might be able to make some new contributions to the core return to roots
production-oriented OM field. The benefits of a customer-based approach, the role of
service in the product mix and the development of service-based strategies were all
contributions that were offered to the manufacturing community (Booms and Bitner,
1981; Bowen et al., 1989; Fry et al., 1994; Quinn et al., 1990). Figure 3 shows the points
relating to stage three. 1285
Stage four – return to roots?
My belief is that we have now entered a fourth stage: one that could be considered the
final step in the creation of a “mature” subject which has been in evidence since 1995,
the intention and ability to be prescriptive (Johnston, 1996). A stage when much (but
not necessarily all) of the material can be taken and applied, and where the outcome of
its application can be predicted (Berry, 1995; Heskett et al., 1997; Rust and Oliver, 1994).
Collier (1994), for example, has been developing models to show the relationship
between perceived service quality and operational performance. Heskett et al. (1997),
Rust and Oliver (1994) and Voss and Johnston (1995) have been undertaking empirical
work to understand the links between operations drivers, for example, quality, staff
satisfaction, internal quality, and outcomes such as profit and customer satisfaction. It
is this type of work that seems set to continue for some years to come.
Figure 3.
Stage three – the service
management era
IJOPM However, a new significant wind of change is that the previous trend towards
25,12 cross-functional work seems in reverse. I believe we are witnessing some tensions
between the functions. Indeed I would venture to suggest that rather than seeing a
continuance of the overlapping of the areas of marketing, operations and HRM for
example, we are witnessing their moving apart from each other. This change is driven
by a basic desire to re-establish the service material within the core disciplines. It
1286 appears that we have forgotten, or mislaid, our established roots and academics have
focused on material and approaches depicted in the circles in the last column of
Figure 4. We seem to have been swept along on the tide of interest in service focused
predominantly from a customer perspective. Whilst there is nothing unhealthy,
or indeed inappropriate, in this, we seem to have ignored the strength that our core
discipline has to offer. In service quality, for example, we have focused on
Figure 4.
Stage four – return to
roots?
customer-based notions of service quality, but appear to have ignored quality of Service OM:
conformance and the delivery of customer-based quality, surely key issues for return to roots
operations managers and academics. In service design, we seem to have followed the
blueprinting movement but we appear to have ignored the process of design in favour
of this descriptive activity and the relationship between important, and often ignored,
back-office activities in favour of customer-facing processes.
1287
A service operations management agenda
This growing awareness of the need to re-operationalise service management material
has led to an attempt to develop an agenda[1]. This section identifies some possible
research issues and questions emphasising the core operational issues.
Linking operational performance to business drivers

Developing the work of Voss and Johnston (1995), Roth et al. (1997) and the pioneering
work on the service profit chain by Heskett et al. (1997), there is a growing awareness
of the importance of linking business drivers such as leadership, customer orientation,
and more operational issues such as benchmarking, quality control and service design,
with their impact on business performance. Although the work cited above has made
significant inroads into this area, there is much more work to do. Indeed there is
significant practitioner interest in this area, witnessed by the growing interest in the
use of the Baldrige criteria and the UK/European Foundation for Quality Awards on
this side of the Atlantic. Chase (1996) points out the important roles that operations can
play in this movement: “service operations is the appropriate discipline to begin to
move business from its current emphasis on reengineering to the next step – revenue
enhancement”. Two key research questions are:
RQ1 What are the most efficient operational profit levers and under what
circumstances?
RQ2 Can we map the relationships between the controllable and the outcome
variables?
Performance measurement and operations improvement

Despite some major work in the performance measurement area (Fitzgerald et al., 1991;
Kaplan and Norton, 1996; Lynch and Cross, 1991), many organisations seem reluctant
to critically review and develop their performance measurement systems. The
balanced scorecard, although a major step forward for many organisations, has led to a
degree of complacency once an organisation, and its SBUs, have found measures to fit
all four boxes. (One organisation was pleased to have developed new measures
including “number of staff training days” and “number of processes benchmarked”
without any concern as to whether any improvements resulted from these activities.):
(1) How can we develop frameworks to help organisations review the nature and
effect of the performance measures used?
(2) In what situations are historical measures and targets appropriate and in what
situations are externally based targets more appropriate?
(3) Do radical step change improvement programmes yield better or faster results
than TQM type continuous change programmes?
IJOPM (4) Does benchmarking yield the desired results or does it get caught up in
25,12 interminable and unfruitful discussions about “apples and pears” or degenerate
into “industrial tourism”?
Guarantees, complaints and service recovery – tools for performance improvement

I believe that much organisational practice in the area of complaints and recovery has
1288 regressed into mere marketing ploys. Complaints procedures in some organisations
have become mechanisms to pass on tokens or small payouts to disgruntled customers.
Guarantees often seem little more than your statutory rights, or an “opportunity” to
purchase insurance so that, if the product or service fails, the vendor is not troubled
with the problem (and so is unaware of the in-built problems of their products or
services). Service recovery appears to have become reactive, with staff carefully
listening to, sympathising with, and then paying off the customer but never sorting out
the root problem. (At a recent visit to a hotel, I informed the manager about a whole
series of problems I had encountered during a ten-hour stay. Without making notes of
any of them, she kindly offered me another breakfast free of charge.):
.
How can we link complaints and failures to organisational improvement?
.
How can organisational learning develop from mistakes?
.
How can organisations be proactive in finding and dealing with mistakes before
their customers tell them (or more often do not tell them)?
.
What are good service guarantees and how can they be operationalised?
. What evidence is there that complaints, guarantees or service recovery drive
improvements within an organisation?
.
How is learning best captured and applied?
People management
Despite some excellent additions to the literature in the HRM area (such as Berry, 1995;
Schneider and Bowen, 1995), operations academics need to retrace their roots and focus
on the design of jobs. The problem is not knowing that customers expect empathy,
reliability, assurance etc. but delivering it time after time, month after month, week
after week, day after day, hour after hour. (A recent BBC documentary portrays a
heterosexual male prostitute in Australia providing service to his clients, hour after
hour, sometimes for a week at a time.) We need to understand how all employees can
deliver constant and consistent high levels of service and how we can design jobs and
motivate employees to do this:
.
What are the key service operational competencies?
.
How do we develop those competencies?
.
How do operations managers go about maintaining the energy and commitment
of front-line workers?
.
How does one ensure that a constant level of service is provided?
Service design
The service design models used in the literature are strongly based upon product
design processes, yet there is some evidence that product design processes are not
used, or indeed applicable, in service situations (Shulver and Slack, 1997). Do we
understand how services are designed from conception to consumption and how Service OM:
existing product-based models can be applied? return to roots
.
What is a service design?
.
How is a service concept developed into a service?
.
What is a service concept?
. What are the most effective methods of developing a service? 1289
.
What are good design tools and techniques?
.
Seamless service is a great idea for a customer, but how does one achieve this in
most “silo-based” organisations?
.
How can the world wide web be utilised to create new services, even virtual
services and the use of virtual reality simulations in service (no, I do not have the
prostitute in mind)?
.
How do we capture the technological dimensions of the next century?
Service technology
There are a few documented examples of technological disasters, yet there are many
more but less well-known, or documented, examples of technological successes.
One reason for failure is that technology is often superimposed on inefficient, outdated
operational systems, in the expectation that it will overcome inherent problems (Lewis
and Chambers, 1997). Unfortunately, there is only limited material in the service
literature about the difficulties of implementing new technology, or indeed any
categorisation of the various types of technologies in use. It would also appear that
managers seem to have a difficulty in assessing the “true” impact of new technology
(Lewis and Chambers, 1997). Furthermore, investment in service technology does not
appear to have significantly reduced costs for the provision of services. Brunsdon and
Walley (1997) refer to this as the “productivity paradox”:
.
What are the categories of service technologies and their relative impact?
.
What are the inherent difficulties in implementing new technology?
.
What are the success factors?
.
What is the relationship between investment in technology and cost reduction?
The design of internal networks

Gremler et al. (1994) define internal service encounters as the didactic interrelation
between an internal customer and an internal service provider. The supply chain
literature, however, has moved away from such simplistic relationships to the idea of
networks of relationships (Harland, 1996). This network approach needs to underpin
future research in the internal customer chain. Can notions of external quality and
customer satisfaction be used with internal supply chains? Slack et al. (1995) stated
that internal customers cannot be treated in exactly the same way as external
customers. External customers usually, though not always, operate in a free market.
The internal customer is often a captive customer and so many of the current concepts
of service quality and performance measurement from an external customer
perspective (e.g. customer satisfaction) have found little credence in internal
IJOPM customer-supplier relationships. This seems to be changing as organisations are
25,12 looking increasingly at contracting-out internal services:
.
Can supply chain networks be implemented within organisations?
.
How well does service quality translate to internal supply networks?
.
What is the relationship between internal service quality and staff satisfaction
1290 and external quality and customer satisfaction?
.
How can organisations cost and value internal services?
The service encounter

The service encounter is the crux of service delivery, yet how much do we know about
which are the right scripts, attitudes, behaviours to achieve the desired effect? How do
we ensure that each encounter in a service process has the right cumulative effect on
customers’ overall perceived service quality?
.
What are the “right” scripts for different types of service?
.
Do we know how to design and control the series of encounters that comprise the
service process?
Managing service capacity

Some work exists in the management of service capacity in terms of staff scheduling
(Goodale and Tunc, 1998; Thompson, 1996). Strategies for managing demand and
supply in service operations have also been documented; however, there has been little
advancement since the first paper by Sasser (1976). Yet this is an area, which is
fundamental to the planning and control of service. Another issue, the subject of a
preliminary investigation, is the relationship between capacity levels and the level of
service quality delivered. Clark and James (1997) provide some conceptual models of
intuitively-derived relationships between resource utilisation and service quality. Is it
now possible to derive empirically these functions and assess strategies for effective
resource utilisation linked to required quality levels?
.
What are appropriate capacity strategies? How does customer contact relate to
types of strategies?
.
What is the relationship of capacity levels and capacity strategies to the level of
service quality delivered, for example?
.
How can organisations best manage their quality-capacity relationships?
Conclusion
My view is that in stage four we are seeing a return to roots, which is no bad thing.
This will add new depth and grounding to the literature on service management.
In operations it will allow us and encourage us to undertake research and make strong
statements about things, which we understand (quality, design and improvement, for
example). But somehow, we need to add this depth and focus without losing the
richness that has developed as different functional areas have come together to share
areas of common interest. I think that holding these areas together will be a greater
challenge to service academics over the next few years than the research agendas to
which we are compellingly and enthusiastically drawn.
Note Service OM:
1. This agenda is partly based upon discussions with Dick Chase, Peter Docherty, Christopher return to roots
Easingwood, Ulf Karlsson, Jos Lemmink, Jan Mattsson, David Tansik and Chris Voss at the
Service Operations Research Workshop, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, 19-21 September
1997.
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Service Opns Return To Roots

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Service operations management: return to roots

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IJOPM ORIGINAL PAPER

Operations academics, just like operations practitioners, tend to be enthusiasts.

I would like to add a couple more:

Stage one – service awakening

Stage two – breaking free from product-based roots

Stage three – the service management era

Topic Selected references

Customer relationships Storbacka (1995) and Storbacka et al. (1994)

Linking operational performance to business drivers

Performance measurement and operations improvement

Guarantees, complaints and service recovery – tools for performance improvement

The design of internal networks

The service encounter

Managing service capacity

Vol. 66 No. 4, pp. 54-62.

Economics and Business Administration, Helsingfors.

1. Organizational and IT Perspectives of Service Systems and Networks 127-157. [CrossRef]

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